Journal of Geophysical Research

• 1. Introduction

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  The Journal of Geophysical Research began not as a sweeping survey of the Earth and cosmos, but as a narrow bulletin called Terrestrial Magnetism. Louis Agricola Bauer, the first president of the American Geophysical Union, founded it in 1896. What he launched was a modest publication tracking the invisible forces that pull compass needles toward the poles. What it became, over the course of a century, was the flagship journal of the entire union. Along the way it changed its name twice, splintered into seven distinct scientific sections, and grew to publish nearly three thousand articles in a single year. How does a journal dedicated to magnetism end up covering the surfaces of distant moons and the biology of soil? And what does the shape of a scientific publication tell us about how human knowledge of the Earth itself has expanded?

• 2. From Magnetism to Everything

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  Bauer's original title, Terrestrial Magnetism, precisely described what the journal was built to do: track the magnetic properties of the ground beneath our feet and the air above. Three years after its founding, in 1899, the editors broadened the scope just enough to add Atmospheric Electricity to the name. That pairing of magnetism and electrical phenomena in the atmosphere held for nearly half a century. Then, in 1948, the journal shed both words and took the name it carries today. The shift from a narrow descriptive label to the open-ended Journal of Geophysical Research was more than a rebranding. It was a statement that the field had grown too large and too varied to be captured by any single phenomenon. The name left room for everything that followed.

• 3. Seven Sections, Seven Sciences

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  In 1980, editors introduced three formal sections: A for Space Physics, B for Solid Earth, and C for Oceans. Each was published as a separate issue, with its own editorial team. The move acknowledged that researchers in oceanography and researchers in space plasma physics were not really reading each other's work. Section D, covering Atmospheres, arrived in 1984. Section E for Planets followed in 1991. Earth Surface became its own section in 2003, and Biogeosciences joined in 2005. The scope of Section E is striking: it covers geology, geophysics, geochemistry, atmospheres, biology, and dynamics not just of planets but of satellites, asteroids, rings, comets, and meteorites. Studies of the Earth itself can appear there when the question is about exogenic effects, or when the point is to compare Earth to other worlds. Section G, Biogeosciences, sits at the interface between biology and the geosciences, attempting to understand how the Earth system functions across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

• 4. How the Journal Is Run

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  Each of the seven sections is managed by one or more editors appointed by the President of the American Geophysical Union. Those editors serve terms of three to four years, and each can appoint associate editors to help manage the review load. When the journal moved to Wiley as its publisher, each section received its own distinct ISSN number. The Editor-in-Chief of JGR-Space Physics described the practical consequence: within a couple of years of that switch, each section would carry its own impact factor rather than sharing a single number across all seven areas. That matters for researchers, because impact factors shape where scientists choose to publish and how funding bodies assess a body of work.

• 5. Reach and Influence

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  The journal is indexed in GEOBASE, GeoRef, Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science, and several CSA indexes, placing it within reach of researchers across disciplines. In 2010, it published 2,995 articles. That same year, the Journal Citation Reports gave it an impact factor of 3.303, which ranked it 15th out of 165 journals in the category Geosciences, Multidisciplinary. The Atmospheres section drew particular notice in the area of climate research: between 1999 and 2009, JGR-Atmospheres was the 6th most cited publication on climate change. Several of the journal's papers have crossed one thousand citations each, a threshold that marks them as foundational references in their fields rather than ordinary contributions to the literature.